The Queens Gambit - Walter Tevis

She looked at him. “Beth,” she said. “I’m called Beth.” During the next few weeks she forgot about the visit in Mrs. Deardorff’s office and absorbed herself in schoolwork and in reading. She had found a set of girls’ books and was reading through them whenever she had a chance—in study halls, at night in bed, on Sunday afternoons. They were about the adventures of the oldest daughter in a big, haphazard family. Six months before, Methuen had gotten a TV set for the lounge, and it was played for an hour every evening. But Beth found that she preferred Ellen Forbes’s adventures to I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke. She would sit up in bed, alone in the dormitory, and read until lights out. No one bothered her. One evening in mid-September she was alone reading when Fergussen came in. “Shouldn’t you be packing?” he asked. She closed her book, using her thumb to keep her place. “Why?” “They haven’t told you?” “Told me what?” “You’ve been adopted. You’re being picked up after breakfast.” She just sat there on the edge of the bed, staring at Fergussen’s broad white T-shirt. *** “Jolene,” she said. “I can’t find my book.” “What book?” Jolene said sleepily. It was just before lights out. “Modern Chess Openings, with a red cover. I keep it in my nightstand.” Jolene shook her head. “Beats the shit out of me.” Beth hadn’t looked at the book for weeks, but she clearly remembered putting it at the bottom of the second drawer. She had a brown nylon valise beside her on the bed; it was packed with her three dresses and four sets of underwear, her toothbrush, comb, a bar of Dial soap, two barrettes and some plain cotton handkerchiefs. Her nightstand was now completely empty. She had looked in the library for her book, but it wasn’t there. There was nowhere else to look. She had not played a game of chess in three years except in her mind, but Modern Chess Openings was the only thing she owned that she cared about. She squinted at Jolene. “You didn’t see it, did you?”

Jolene looked angry for a moment. “Watch who you go accusing,” she said. “I got no use for a book like that.” Then her voice softened. “I hear you’re leaving.” “That’s right.” Jolene laughed. “What’s the matter? Don’t want to go?” “I don’t know.” Jolene slipped under the bedsheet and pulled it up over her shoulders. “Just say ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Yes, ma’am’ and you’ll do all right. Tell ’em you’re grateful to have a Christian home like theirs and maybe they’ll give you a TV in your room.” There was something odd about the way Jolene was talking. “Jolene,” Beth said, “I’m sorry.” “Sorry about what?” “I’m sorry you didn’t get adopted.” Jolene snorted. “Shit,” she said, “I make out fine right here.” She rolled over away from Beth and curled up in bed. Beth started to reach out toward her, but just then Miss Furth stepped in the doorway and said, “Lights out, girls!” Beth went back to her bed, for the last time. The next day Mrs. Deardorff went with them out to the parking lot and stood by the car while Mr. Wheatley got into the driver’s seat and Mrs. Wheatley and Beth got into the back. “Be a good girl, Elizabeth,” Mrs. Deardorff said. Beth nodded and as she did so saw that someone was standing behind Mrs. Deardorff on the porch of the Administration Building. It was Mr. Shaibel. He had his hands stuffed in his coverall pockets and was looking toward the car. She wanted to get out and go over to him, but Mrs. Deardorff was in the way, so she leaned back in her seat. Mrs. Wheatley began talking, and Mr. Wheatley started the car. As they pulled out, Beth twisted around in her seat and waved out the back window at him, but he made no response. She could not tell for sure if he had seen her or not. *** “You should have seen their faces,” Mrs. Wheatley said. She was wearing the same blue cardigan, but this time she had a faded gray dress under it,

and her nylons were rolled down to her ankles. “They looked in all my closets and even inspected the refrigerator. I could see immediately that they were impressed with my provisions. Have some more of the tuna casserole. I certainly enjoy watching a young child eat.” Beth put a little more on her plate. The problem was that it was too salty, but she hadn’t said anything about that. It was her first meal at the Wheatleys’. Mr. Wheatley had already left for Denver on business and would be away for several weeks. A photograph of him sat on the upright piano by the heavily draped dining-room window. In the living room the TV was playing unattended; a deep male voice was declaiming about Anacin. Mr. Wheatley had driven them to Lexington in silence and then gone immediately upstairs. He came down after a few minutes with a suitcase, kissed Mrs. Wheatley distractedly on the cheek, nodded a goodbye to Beth and left. “They wanted to know everything about us. How much money Allston makes a month. Why we have no children of our own. They even inquired”—Mrs. Wheatley bent forward over the Pyrex dish and spoke in a stage whisper—“they even inquired if I had been in psychiatric care.” She leaned back and let out her breath. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine?” “No, ma’am,” Beth said, filling in the sudden silence. She took another forkful of tuna and followed it with a drink of water. “They are thorough,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “But, you know, I suppose they have to be.” She had not touched anything on her plate. During the two hours since they arrived, Mrs. Wheatley had spent the time jumping up from whatever chair she was sitting in and going to check the oven or adjust one of the Rosa Bonheur prints on the walls, or empty her ashtray. She chattered almost constantly while Beth put in an occasional “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am.” Beth had not yet been shown her room; her brown nylon bag still sat by the front door next to the overflowing magazine rack where she had left it at ten-thirty that morning. “God knows,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying, “God knows they have to be meticulous about whom they turn their charges over to. You can’t have scoundrels taking the responsibility for a growing child.” Beth set her fork down carefully. “May I go to the bathroom, please?”

“Why, certainly.” She pointed to the living room with her fork. Mrs. Wheatley had been holding the fork all during lunch, even though she had eaten nothing. “The white door to the left of the sofa.” Beth got up, squeezed past the piano that practically filled the small dining room and went into the living room and through its clutter of coffee table and lamp tables and huge rosewood TV, now showing an afternoon drama. She walked carefully across the Orion shag carpet and into the bathroom. The bathroom was tiny and completely done in robin’s-egg blue —the same shade as Mrs. Wheatley’s cardigan. It had a blue carpet and little blue guest towels and a blue toilet seat. Even the toilet paper was blue. Beth lifted the toilet seat, vomited the tunafish into the bowl and flushed it. *** When they got to the top of the stairs Mrs. Wheatley rested for a moment, leaning her hip against the banister and breathing heavily. Then she took a few steps along the carpeted hallway and dramatically pushed a door open. “This,” she said, “will be your room.” Since it was a small house, Beth had visualized something tiny for herself, but when she walked in she caught her breath. It looked enormous to her. The floor was bare and painted gray, with a pink oval rug at the side of the double bed. She had never had a room of her own before. She stood, holding her valise, and looked around her. There was a dresser, and a desk whose orange-looking wood matched it, with a pink glass lamp on it, and a pink chenille bedspread on the enormous bed. “You have no idea how difficult it is to find good maple furniture,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying, “but I think I did very well, if I do say so myself.” Beth hardly heard her. This room was hers. She looked at the heavily painted white door; there was a key in it, under the knob. She could lock the door and no one could come in. Mrs. Wheatley showed her where the bathroom was down the hall and then left her alone to unpack, closing the door behind her. Beth set down her bag and walked around, stopping only briefly to look out each of the windows at the tree-lined street below. There was a closet, bigger than Mother’s had been, and a nightstand by the bed, with a little reading lamp. It was a beautiful room. If only Jolene could see it. For a moment she felt like crying for Jolene, she wanted Jolene to be there, going around the room

with her while they looked at all the furniture and then hung Beth’s clothes in the closet. In the car Mrs. Wheatley had said how glad they were to have an older child. Then why not adopt Jolene? Beth had thought. But she said nothing. She looked at Mr. Wheatley with his grim-set jaw and his two pale hands on the steering wheel and then at Mrs. Wheatley and she knew they would never have adopted Jolene. Beth sat on the bed and shook off the memory. It was a wonderfully soft bed, and it smelled clean and fresh. She bent over and pulled off her shoes and lay back, stretching out on its great, comforting expanse, turning her head happily to look over at the tightly closed door that gave her this room entirely to herself. She lay awake for several hours that night, not wanting to go to sleep right away. There was a streetlight outside her windows, but they had good, heavy shades that she could pull down to block it out. Before saying goodnight, Mrs. Wheatley had shown Beth her own room. It was on the other side of the hall and exactly the same size as Beth’s, but it had a television set in it and chairs with slipcovers and a blue coverlet on the bed. “It’s really a remodeled attic,” Mrs. Wheatley said. Lying in bed, Beth could hear the distant sound of Mrs. Wheatley coughing and later she heard her bare feet padding down the hallway to the bathroom. But she didn’t mind. Her own door was closed and locked. No one could push it open and let the light fall on her face. Mrs. Wheatley was alone in her own room, and there would be no sounds of talking or quarreling—only music and low synthetic voices from the television set. It would be wonderful to have Jolene there, but then she wouldn’t have the room to herself, wouldn’t be able to lie alone in this huge bed, stretched out in the middle of it, having the cool sheets and now the silence to herself. *** On Monday she went to school. Mrs. Wheatley took her in a taxi, even though it was less than a mile. Beth went into seventh grade. It was a lot like the public high school in that other town where she had done the chess exhibition, and she knew her clothes weren’t right, but no one paid much attention to her. A few of the other students stared for a minute when the

teacher introduced her to the class, but that was it. She was given books and assigned to a home room. From the books and what the teachers said in class she knew it would be easy. She recoiled a bit at the loud noises in the hallways between classes, and felt self-conscious a few times when other students looked at her, but it was not difficult. She felt she could deal with anything that might come up in this sunny, noisy public school. At lunchtime she tried to sit alone in the cafeteria with her ham sandwich and carton of milk, but another girl came and sat across from her. Neither of them spoke for a while. The other girl was plain, like Beth. When she had finished half her sandwich Beth looked across the table at her. “Is there a school chess club?” she asked. The other girl looked up, startled. “What?” “Do they have a chess club? I want to join.” “Oh,” the girl said. “I don’t think they have anything like that. You can try out for junior cheerleader.” Beth finished her sandwich. *** “You certainly spend a lot of time at your studies,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Don’t you have any hobbies?” Actually, Beth was not studying; she was reading a novel from the school library. She was sitting in the armchair in her room, by the window. Mrs. Wheatley had knocked and then come in, wearing a pink chenille bathrobe and pink satin slippers. She walked over and sat on the edge of Beth’s bed, smiling at her distractedly, as though she were thinking about something else. Beth had lived with her a week now and she noticed that Mrs. Wheatley was often that way. “I used to play chess,” Beth said. Mrs. Wheatley blinked. “Chess?” “I like it a lot.” Mrs. Wheatley shook her head as though shaking something out of her hair. “Oh, chess!” she said. “The royal game. How nice.” “Do you play?” Beth said. “Oh, Lord, no!” Mrs. Wheatley said with a self-deprecating laugh. “I haven’t the mind for it. But my father used to play. My father was a surgeon

and quite refined in his ways; I believe he was a superior chess player in his time.” “Could I play chess with him?” “Hardly,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “My father passed on years ago.” “Is there anyone I could play with?” “Play chess? I have no idea.” Mrs. Wheatley peered at her for a moment. “Isn’t it primarily a game for boys?” “Girls play,” she said. “How nice!” But Mrs. Wheatley was clearly miles away. *** Mrs. Wheatley spent two days getting the house cleaned for Miss Farley, and she sent Beth to brush her hair three times on the morning of the visit. When Miss Farley came in the door she was followed by a tall man wearing a football jacket. Beth was shocked to see it was Fergussen. He looked mildly embarrassed. “Hi there, Harmon,” he said. “I invited myself along.” He walked into Mrs. Wheatley’s living room and stood there with his hands in his pockets. Miss Farley had a set of forms and a check list. She wanted to know about Beth’s diet and her schoolwork and what plans she had for the summer. Mrs. Wheatley did most of the talking. Beth could see her become more expansive with each question. “You can have no idea,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “of how marvelously well Beth has adjusted to the school environment. Her teachers have been immensely impressed with her work…” Beth could not remember any conversations between Mrs. Wheatley and the teachers at school, but she said nothing. “I had hoped to see Mr. Wheatley, too,” Miss Farley said. “Will he be here soon?” Mrs. Wheatley smiled at her. “Allston called earlier to say he was terribly sorry, but he couldn’t come. He’s really been working so hard.” She looked over at Beth, still smiling. “Allston is a marvelous provider.” “Is he able to spend much time with Beth?” Miss Farley said. “Why, of course!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Allston is a wonderful father to her.”

Shocked, Beth looked down at her hands. Not even Jolene could lie so well. For a moment she had believed it herself, had seen an image of a helpful, fatherly Allston Wheatley—an Allston Wheatley who did not exist outside of Mrs. Wheatley’s words. But then she remembered the real one, grim, distant and silent. And there had been no call from him. During the hour they were there, Fergussen said almost nothing. When they got up to leave, he held out his hand to Beth and her heart sank. “Good to see you, Harmon,” he said. She took his hand to shake it, wishing that he could stay behind somehow, to be with her. *** A few days later Mrs. Wheatley took her downtown to shop for clothes. When the bus stopped at their corner, Beth stepped into it without hesitation, even though it was the first time she’d ever been on a bus. It was a warm fall Saturday, and Beth was uncomfortable in her Methuen wool skirt and could hardly wait to get a new one. She began to count the blocks to downtown. They got off at the seventeenth corner. Mrs. Wheatley took her hand, although it was hardly necessary, and ushered her across a few yards of busy sidewalks into the revolving doors of Ben Snyder’s Department Store. It was ten in the morning and the aisles were full of women carrying big dark purses and shopping bags. Mrs. Wheatley walked through the crowd with the sureness of an expert. Beth followed. Before they looked at anything to wear, Mrs. Wheatley took her down the broad stairs to the basement, where she spent twenty minutes at a counter with what a card said were “Dinner Napkin Irregulars,” putting together six blue ones from the multicolored pile, rejecting dozens in the process. She waited while Mrs. Wheatley assembled her set in a kind of mesmerized trial and error and then decided she didn’t really need napkins. They went to another counter with “Book Bargains” on it. Mrs. Wheatley read out the titles of a great many thirty-nine-cent books, picked up several and leafed through them but didn’t buy any. Finally they took the escalator back to the main floor. There they stopped at a perfume counter so Mrs. Wheatley could spray one wrist with Evening in Paris and the other with Emeraude. “All right, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said

finally, “we’ll go up to four.” She smiled at Beth. “Young Ladies’ Ready-to- Wear.” Between the third and fourth floors Beth looked back and saw a sign on a counter that said BOOKS AND GAMES, and right near the sign, on a glass- topped counter, were three chess sets. “Chess!” she said, tugging Mrs. Wheatley’s sleeve. “What is it?” Mrs. Wheatley said, clearly annoyed. “They sell chess sets,” Beth said. “Can we go back?” “Not so loud,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “We’ll go by on the way back down.” But they didn’t. Mrs. Wheatley spent the rest of the morning having Beth try on coats from marked-down racks and turn around to show her the hemline and go over near the window so she could see the fabric by “natural light,” and finally buying one and insisting they go down by elevator. “Aren’t we going to look at the chess sets?” Beth said, but Mrs. Wheatley didn’t answer. Beth’s feet hurt, and she was perspiring. She did not like the coat she was carrying in a cardboard box. It was the same robin’s-egg blue as Mrs. Wheatley’s omnipresent sweater, and it didn’t fit. Beth did not know much about clothes, but she could tell that this store sold cheap ones. When the elevator stopped at the third floor, Beth started to remind her about the chess sets, but the door closed and they went down to the main floor. Mrs. Wheatley took Beth’s hand and led her across the street to the bus stop, complaining about the difficulty of finding anything these days. “But after all,” she said philosophically as the bus drew up to the corner, “we got what we came for.” The next week in English class some girls behind Beth were talking before the teacher came in. “Did you get those shoes at Ben Snyder’s or something?” one of them said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in Ben Snyder’s,” the other girl said, laughing. *** Beth walked to school every morning, along shady streets of quiet houses with trees on their lawns. Other students went the same way, and Beth recognized some of them, but she always walked alone. She had enrolled

two weeks late in the fall term, and after her fourth week, mid-term exams began. On Tuesday she had no tests in the morning and was supposed to go to her home room. Instead she took the bus downtown, carrying her notebook and the forty cents she had saved from her quarter-a-week allowance. She had her change ready when she got on the bus. The chess sets were still on the counter, but up close she could see that they weren’t very good. When she picked up the white queen she was surprised at how light it was. She turned it over. It was hollow inside and made of plastic. She put it back as the saleswoman came up and said, “May I help you?” “Do you have Modern Chess Openings?” “We have chess and checkers and backgammon,” the woman said, “and a variety of children’s games.” “It’s a book,” Beth said, “about chess.” “The book department is across the aisle.” Beth went to the bookshelves and began looking through them. There was nothing about chess. There was no clerk to ask, either. She went back to the woman at the counter and had to wait a long time to get her attention. “I’m trying to find a book about chess,” Beth told her. “We don’t handle books in this department,” the woman said and started to turn away again. “Is there a bookstore near here?” Beth asked quickly. “Try Morris’s.” She went over to a stack of boxes and began straightening them. “Where is it?” The woman said nothing. “Where’s Morris, ma’am?” Beth said loudly. The woman turned and looked at her furiously. “On Upper Street,” she said. “Where’s Upper Street?” The woman looked for a moment as if she would scream. Then her face relaxed and she said, “Two blocks up Main.” Beth took the escalators down. ***

Morris’s was on a corner, next to a drugstore. Beth pushed open the door and found herself in a big room full of more books than she had ever seen in her life. There was a bald man sitting on a stool behind a counter, smoking a cigarette and reading. Beth walked up to him and said, “Do you have Modem Chess Openings?” The man turned from his book and peered at her over his glasses. “That’s an odd one,” he said in a pleasant voice. “Do you have it?” “I think so.” He got up from the stool and walked to the rear of the store. A minute later he came back to Beth, carrying it in his hand. It was the same fat book with the same red cover. She caught her breath when she saw it. “Here you go,” the man said, handing it to her. She took it and opened it to the part on the Sicilian Defense. It was good to see the names of the variations again; the Levenfish, the Dragon, the Najdorf. They were like incantations in her head, or the names of saints. After a while she heard the man speaking to her. “Are you that serious about chess?” “Yes,” she said. He smiled. “I thought that book was only for grandmasters.” Beth hesitated. “What’s a grandmaster?” “A genius player,” the man said. “Like Capablanca, except that was a long time ago. There are others nowadays, but I don’t know their names.” She had never seen anyone quite like this man before. He was very relaxed, and he talked to her as though she were another adult. Fergussen was the closest thing to him, but Fergussen was sometimes very official. “How much is the book?” Beth asked. “Pretty much. Five ninety-five.” She had been afraid it would be something like that. After today’s two bus fares she would have ten cents left. She held the book out to him and said, “Thank you. I can’t afford it.” “Sorry,” he said. “Just put it on the counter.” She set it down. “Do you have other books about chess?” “Sure. Under Games and Sports. Go take a look.” At the back of the store was a whole shelf of them with titles like Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess; Winning Chess Traps; How to

Improve Your Chess; Improved Chess Strategy. She took down one called Attack and Counterattack in Chess and began reading the games, picturing them in her mind without reading the diagrams. She stood there for a long time while a few customers went in and out of the store. No one bothered her. She read through game after game and was surprised in some of them by dazzling moves—queen sacrifices and smothered males. There were sixty games, and each had a title at the top of the page, like “V. Smyslov—I. Rudakavsky: Moscow 1945” or “A. Rubinstein—O. Duras: Vienna 1908.” In that one, White queened a pawn on the thirty-sixth move by threatening a discovered check. Beth looked at the cover of the book. It was smaller than Modem Chess Openings and there was a sticker on it that said $2.95. She began going through it systematically. The clock on the bookstore wall read ten-thirty. She would have to leave in an hour to get to school for the History exam. Up front the clerk was paying no attention to her, absorbed in his own reading. She began concentrating, and by eleven-thirty she had twelve of the games memorized. On the bus back to school she began playing them over in her head. Behind some of the moves—not the glamorous ones like the queen sacrifices but sometimes only in the one-square advance of a pawn—she could see subtleties that made the small hairs on the back of her neck tingle. She was five minutes late for the test, but no one seemed to care and she finished before everyone else anyway. In the twenty minutes until the end of the period she played “P. Keres—A. Tarnowski: Helsinki 1952.” It was the Ruy Lopez Opening where White brought the bishop out in a way that Beth could see meant an indirect attack on Black’s king pawn. On the thirty-fifth move White brought his rook down to the knight seven square in a shocking way that made Beth almost cry out in her seat. *** Fairfield Junior High had social clubs that met for an hour after school and sometimes during home-room period on Fridays. There was the Apple Pi Club and the Sub Debs and Girls Around Town. They were like sororities at a college, and you had to be pledged. The girls in Apple Pi were eighth and ninth graders; most of them wore bright cashmere sweaters and fashionably

scuffed saddle oxfords with argyle socks. Some of them lived in the country and owned horses. Thoroughbreds. Girls like that never looked at you in the hallways; they were always smiling at someone else. Their sweaters were bright yellow and deep blue and pastel green. Their socks came up to just below the knees and were made of 100 percent virgin wool from England. Sometimes when Beth saw herself in the mirror of the girls’ room between classes, with her straight brown hair and narrow shoulders and round face with dull brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, she would taste the old taste of vinegar in her mouth. The girls who belonged to the clubs wore lipstick and eye shadow; Beth wore no make-up and her hair still fell over her forehead in bangs. It did not occur to her that she would be pledged to a club, nor did it to anyone else. *** “This week,” Mrs. MacArthur said, “we will begin to study the binomial theorem. Does anyone know what a binomial is?” From the back row Beth put up her hand. It was the first time she had done this. “Yes?” Mrs. MacArthur said. Beth stood, feeling suddenly awkward. “A binomial is a mathematical expression containing two terms.” They had studied this last year at Methuen. “X plus Y is a binomial.” “Very good,” Mrs. MacArthur said. The girl in front of Beth was named Margaret; she had glowing blond hair and wore a cashmere sweater of a pale, expensive lavender. As Beth sat down, the blond head turned slightly back toward her. “Brain!” Margaret hissed. “Goddamn brain!” *** Beth was always alone in the halls; it hardly occurred to her that there was any other way to be. Most girls walked in pairs or in threes, but she walked with no one. One afternoon when she was coming out of the library she was startled by the sound of distant laughter and looked down the hall to see, haloed by

afternoon sunlight, the back of a tall black girl. Two shorter girls were standing near her, by the water fountain, looking up at her face as she laughed. None of their features was distinct, and the light from behind them made Beth squint. The taller girl turned slightly, and Beth’s heart almost stopped at the familiar tilt of her head. Beth took a quick dozen steps down the hallway toward them. But it wasn’t Jolene. Beth stopped suddenly and turned away. The three girls left the fountain and pushed noisily out the front door of the building. Beth stood staring after them for a long time. *** “Could you go to Bradley’s and get me some cigs?” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I think I have a cold.” “Yes, ma’am,” Beth said. It was Saturday afternoon and Beth was holding a novel in her lap, but she wasn’t reading it. She was playing over a game between P. Morphy and someone called simply “grandmaster.” There was something peculiar about Morphy’s eighteenth move, of knight to bishop five. It was a good attack, but Beth felt Morphy could have been more destructive with his queen’s rook. “I’ll give you a note, since you’re a bit youthful for smoking yourself.” “Yes, ma’am,” Beth said. “Three packs of Chesterfields.” “Yes, ma’am.” She had been in Bradley’s only once before, with Mrs. Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley gave her a penciled note and a dollar and twenty cents. Beth handed the note to Mr. Bradley at the counter. There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she got the cigarettes, she turned and began looking. Senator Kennedy’s picture was on the cover of Time and Newsweek: he was running for President and probably wouldn’t make it because he was a Catholic. There was a row of women’s magazines that all had faces on their covers like the faces of Margaret and Sue Ann and the other Apple Pi’s. Their hair shone; their lips were full and red. She had just decided to leave when something caught her eye. At the lower right-hand corner, where the magazines about photography and

sunbathing and do-it-yourself were, was a magazine with a picture of a chess piece on its cover. She walked over and took it from the rack. On the cover was the title, Chess Review, and the price. She opened it. It was full of games and photographs of people playing chess. There was an article called “The King’s Gambit Reconsidered” and another one called “Morphy’s Brilliancies.” She had just been going over one of Morphy’s games! Her heart began beating faster. She kept going through the pages. There was an article about chess in Russia. And the thing that kept turning up was the word “tournament.” There was a whole section called “Tournament Life.” She had not known there was such a thing as a chess tournament. She thought chess was just something you did, the way Mrs. Wheatley hooked rugs and put together jigsaw puzzles. “Young lady,” Mr. Bradley said, “you have to buy the magazine or put it back.” She turned, startled. “Can’t I just…?” “Read the sign,” Mr. Bradley said. In front of her was a hand-lettered sign: IF YOU WANT TO READ IT—BUY IT. Beth had fifteen cents and that was all. Mrs. Wheatley had told her a few days before that she would have to do without an allowance for a while; they were rather short and Mr. Wheatley had been delayed out West. Beth put the magazine back and left the store. Halfway back up the block she stopped, thought a moment and went back. There was a stack of newspapers on the counter, by Mr. Bradley’s elbow. She handed him a dime and took one. Mr. Bradley was busy with a lady who was paying for a prescription. Beth went over to the end of the magazine rack with her paper under her arm and waited. After a few minutes Mr. Bradley said, “We have three sizes.” She heard him going to the back of the store with the lady following. Beth took the copy of Chess Review and slipped it into her newspaper. Outside in the sunshine she walked a block with the paper under her arm. At the first corner she stopped, took out the magazine and slipped it under the waistband of her skirt, covering it with her robbin’s-egg-blue sweater, made of reprocessed wool and bought at Ben Snyder’s. She pulled the sweater down loosely over the magazine and dropped the newspaper into the corner trash can.

Walking home with the folded magazine tucked securely against her flat belly she thought again about that rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven, and Black had better not take it with his knight because… She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking somewhere, and across the street from her on a well- mowed lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After the second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining rook could slide over, and if the black player took the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t… She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing itself with a check. If he did take it, the white pawn moved again, and then the bishop went the other way and there was nothing Black could do. There it was. One of the little boys across the street began crying. There was nothing Black could do. The game would be over in twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had. Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a perfect, stunning diamond. *** “Allston should have returned weeks ago,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying. She was sitting up in bed, with a crossword-puzzle magazine beside her and a little TV set on the dresser with the sound turned down. Beth had just brought her a cup of instant coffee from the kitchen. Mrs. Wheatley was wearing her pink robe and her face was covered with powder. “Will he be back soon?” Beth said. She didn’t really want to talk with Mrs. Wheatley; she wanted to get back to Chess Review. “He has been unavoidably detained,” Mrs. Wheatley said. Beth nodded. Then she said, “I’d like to get a job for after school.” Mrs. Wheatley blinked at her. “A job?” “Maybe I could work in a store, or wash dishes somewhere.”

Mrs. Wheatley stared at her for a long time before speaking. “At thirteen years of age?” she said finally. She blew her nose quietly on a tissue and folded it. “I should think you are well provided for.” “I’d like to make some money.” “To buy clothes with, I suspect.” Beth said nothing. “The only girls of your age who work,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “are colored.” The way she said “colored” made Beth decide to say nothing further about it. To join the United States Chess Federation cost six dollars. Another four dollars got you a subscription to the magazine. There was something even more interesting: in the section called “Tournament Life” there were numbered regions; including one for Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky, and in the listing under it was an item that read: “Kentucky State Championship, Thanksgiving weekend, Henry Clay High School Auditorium, Lexington, Fri., Sat. Sun.,” and under this it said: “$185 in prizes. Entry fee: $5.00. USCF members only.” It would take six dollars to join and five dollars to get into the tournament. When you took the bus down Main you passed Henry Clay High; it was eleven blocks from Janwell Drive. And it was five weeks until Thanksgiving. *** “Can anyone say it verbatim?” Mrs. MacArthur said. Beth put up her hand. “Beth?” She stood. “In any right triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” She sat down. Margaret snickered and leaned toward Gordon, who sat beside her and sometimes held her hand. “That’s the brain!” she whispered in a soft, girlish voice radiant with contempt. Gordon laughed. Beth looked out the window at the autumn leaves. ***

“I do not know where the money goes!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I have bought little more than trifles this month, and yet my hoard has been decimated. Decimated.” She plopped into the chintz-covered armchair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, wide-eyed, as if expecting a guillotine to fall. “I have paid electric bills and telephone bills and have bought simple, uncomplicated groceries. I have denied myself cream for my morning coffee, have bought nothing whatever for my person, have attended neither the cinema nor the rummage sales at First Methodist, and yet I have seven dollars left where I should have at least twenty.” She laid the crumpled one- dollar bills on the table beside her, having fished them from her purse a few moments before. “We have this for ourselves until the end of October. It will scarcely buy chicken necks and porridge.” “Doesn’t Methuen send you a check?” Beth said. Mrs. Wheatley brought her eyes down from the ceiling and stared at her. “For the first year,” she said evenly. “As if the expenses of keeping you didn’t exhaust it.” Beth knew that wasn’t true. The check was seventy dollars, and Mrs. Wheatley didn’t spend that much on her. “It requires twenty dollars for us to live passably until the first of the month,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I am thirteen dollars short of that.” She turned her gaze briefly ceilingward and then back to Beth again. “I shall have to keep better records.” “Maybe it’s inflation,” Beth said, with some truth. She had taken only six, for the membership. “Maybe it is,” Mrs. Wheatley said, mollified. The problem was the five dollars for the entry fee. In home room, the day after Mrs. Wheatley’s oration about money, Beth took a sheet from her composition book and wrote a letter to Mr. Shaibel, Custodian, Methuen Home, Mount Sterling, Kentucky. It read: Dear Mr. Shaibel: There is a chess tournament here with a first prize of one hundred dollars and a second prize of fifty dollars. There are other prizes, too. It costs five dollars to enter it, and I don’t have that. If you will send me the money I will pay you back ten dollars if I win any prize at all.

Very truly yours, Elizabeth Harmon The next morning she took an envelope and a stamp from the cluttered desk in the living room while Mrs. Wheatley was still in bed. She put the letter in the mailbox on her way to school. In November she took another dollar from Mrs. Wheatley’s purse. It had been a week since she wrote Mr. Shaibel, and there had been no answer. This time, with part of the money, she bought the new issue of Chess Review. She found several games that she could improve upon—one by a young grandmaster named Benny Watts. Benny Watts was the United States Champion. *** Mrs. Wheatley seemed to have a good many colds. “I have a proclivity for viruses,” she would say. “Or they for me.” She handed Beth a prescription to take to Bradley’s and a dime to buy herself a Coke. Mr. Bradley gave her an odd look when she came in, but he said nothing. She gave him the prescription and he went to the back of the store. Beth carefully avoided standing near the magazines. When she took the Chess Review a month before, it had been the only copy. He might have noticed it right away. Mr. Bradley brought back a plastic container with a typed label on it. He put it down on the counter while he got a white paper bag. Beth stared at the container. The pills in it were oblong and bright-green. *** “This will be my tranquility medicine,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “McAndrews has decided I need tranquility.” “Who’s McAndrews?” Beth said. “Dr. McAndrews,” Mrs. Wheatley said, unscrewing the lid. “My physician.” She took out two of the pills. “Would you get me a glass of water, dear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Beth said. As she was going into the bathroom for the water, Mrs. Wheatley sighed and said, “Why do they only fill these bottles half full?” *** In the November issue there were twenty-two games from an invitational tournament in Moscow. The players had names like Botvinnik and Petrosian and Laev; they sounded like people in a fairy tale. There was a photograph showing two of them hunched over a board, dark-haired and grim-lipped. They wore black suits. Out of focus, behind them, sat a huge audience. In a game between Petrosian and someone named Benkowitz, in the semifinals, Beth saw a bad decision of Petrosian’s. He started an attack with pawns but shouldn’t have. There was a commentary on the game by an American grandmaster, who thought the pawn moves were good, but Beth saw deeper than that. How could Petrosian have misjudged it? Why hadn’t the American seen the weakness? They must have spent a long time studying it, since the magazine said the game took five hours. *** Margaret only slipped the shaft into her gym lock and didn’t twist the dial afterward. They were in shower stalls side by side now, and Beth could see Margaret’s sizable breasts, like solid cones. Beth’s chest was still like a boy’s and her pubic hair had just started coming in. Margaret ignored Beth and hummed while she soaped herself. Beth stepped out and wrapped herself in a towel. Still wet, she went back into the locker room. There was no one there. Beth dried her hands quickly and very quietly slipped the shaft out of Margaret’s lock, muffling it in her towel. Her hair dripped on her hands, but that didn’t matter; there was water all over from the boys’ gym. Beth slipped off the lock and opened the locker door, slowly so it wouldn’t squeak. Her heart was thumping like some kind of little animal in her chest. It was a fine brown purse of real leather. Beth dried her hands again and lifted it down from the shelf, listening carefully. There were giggles and

shouts from the girls in the shower, but nothing else. She had made a point of being the first in, to get the stall nearest the door, and she had left quickly. No one else would be through yet. She opened the purse. There were colored postcards and a new-looking lipstick and a tortoise- shell comb and an elegant linen handkerchief. Beth pushed through these with her right hand. At the bottom, in a little silver money clip, were bills. She pulled them out. Two fives. She hesitated for a moment and then took them both, together with the clip. She put the purse back and replaced the lock. She had left her own door shut but unlocked. She opened it now and slid the clipped fives into her Algebra book. Then she locked her door, went back to the shower and stayed there washing herself until all the other girls had left. When everyone else was gone, Beth was still getting dressed. Margaret had not opened her purse. Beth sighed deeply, like Mrs. Wheatley. Her heart was still pounding. She got the money clip out of her algebra book and pushed it under the locker Margaret had used. It might have just fallen there from Margaret’s purse, and anybody could have taken the money. She folded the bills and put them in her shoe. Then she took her own blue plastic purse from the shelf, opened it and reached into the little pocket that held the mirror. She took out two green pills, put them in her mouth, went to the washstand and swallowed them down with a paper cup of water. Supper that night was spaghetti and meatballs from a can, with Jell-O for dessert. While Beth was doing the dishes and Mrs. Wheatley was in the living room turning the volume up on the TV, Mrs. Wheatley suddenly said, “Oh, I forgot.” Beth went on scrubbing the spaghetti pan and in a minute Mrs. Wheatley appeared with an envelope in her hand. “This came for you,” she said and went back to the Huntley-Brinkley Report. It was a smudged envelope addressed in pencil. She dried her hands and opened it; there were five one-dollar bills inside and no message. She stood at the sink for a long time, holding the bills in her hand. ***

The green pills were four dollars for a bottle of fifty. The label read: “Three refills.” Beth paid with four one-dollar bills. She walked home briskly and put the prescription slip back in Mrs. Wheatley’s desk.

FOUR At the entrance to the gym a desk had been set up, and two men in white shirts were sitting behind it. Behind them were rows of long tables with green-and-white chessboards. The room was full of people talking and a few playing; most of them were young men or boys. Beth saw one woman and no colored people. Pinned to the desk near the man on the left was a sign that read ENTRY FEES HERE. Beth walked up to him with her five dollars. “Do you have a clock?” the man asked. “No.” “We have a clock-sharing system,” he said. “If your opponent doesn’t have one, come back to the desk. Play starts in twenty minutes. What’s your rating?” “I don’t have a rating.” “Have you ever played in a tournament before?” “No.” The man pointed to Beth’s money. “Are you sure you want to do this?” “I’m sure.” “We don’t have a woman’s section,” he said. She just stared at him. “I’ll put you in Beginners,” he said. “No,” Beth said, “I’m not a beginner.” The other young man had been watching them. “If you’re an unrated player, you go in Beginners with the people under sixteen hundred,” he said. Beth had paid little attention to ratings in Chess Review, but she knew that masters had at least 2200. “What’s the prize for Beginners?” she said. “Twenty.” “What about the other section?” “First prize in the Open is one hundred.” “Is it against any rule for me to be in the Open?”

He shook his head. “Not a rule, exactly, but—” “Then put me in it.” Beth held out the bills. The man shrugged and gave Beth a card to fill out. “There are three guys out there with ratings over eighteen hundred. Beltik may show up, and he’s the state champion. They’ll eat you alive.” She took a ball-point pen and began filling in the card with her name and address. Where a blank said “Rating” she put a large zero. She handed the card back. They started twenty minutes late. It took them a while to get the pairings posted. When they were putting the names on the board Beth asked the man next to her if it was done at random. “Not at all,” he said. “They arrange it by ratings on the first round. After that, winners play winners, and losers, losers.” When her card was finally put up it said “Harmon—Unr—Black.” It was put under one that said “Packer—Unr—White.” The two cards were by the number Twenty-seven. They turned out to be the last two. She walked over to Board Twenty-seven and seated herself at the black pieces. She was at the last board on the farthest table. Sitting next to her was a woman of about thirty. After a minute, two more women came walking over. One was about twenty, and the other was Beth’s opponent—a tall, heavy high school girl. Beth looked over the expanse of tables, where players were getting settled or, already seated, were beginning games; all of them were male, mostly young. There were four female players at the tournament and they were all clumped together at the far end, playing against one another. Beth’s opponent sat down with some awkwardness, put her two-faced chess clock at the side of the board and held out a hand. “I’m Annette Packer,” she said. Her hand felt large and moist in Beth’s. “I’m Beth Harmon,” she said. “I don’t understand about chess clocks.” Annette seemed relieved to have something to explain. “The clock face nearest you measures your playing time. Each player has ninety minutes. After you move, you press the button on top, and it stops your clock and starts your opponent’s. There are little red flags over the number twelve on each clock face; yours will fall down when the ninety minutes are up. If it does that, you’ve lost.” Beth nodded. It seemed like a lot of time to her; she

had never put more than twenty minutes into a chess game. There was a ruled sheet of paper by each player, for recording moves. “You can start my clock now,” Annette said. “Why do they put all the girls together?” Beth said. Annette raised her eyebrows. “They’re not supposed to. But if you win, they move you up.” Beth reached out and pressed down the button and Annette’s clock began ticking. Annette took her king’s pawn somewhat nervously and moved it to king four. “Oh,” she said, “it’s touch move, you know.” “What’s that?” “Don’t touch a piece unless you’re going to move it. If you touch it, you have to move it somewhere.” “Okay,” Beth said. “Don’t you push your button now?” “Sorry,” Annette said and pressed her button. Beth’s clock started ticking. She reached out firmly and moved her queen bishop’s pawn to its fourth square. The Sicilian Defense. She pressed the button and then put her elbows on the table, on each side of the board, like the Russians in the photographs. She began attacking on the eighth move. On the tenth she had one of Annette’s bishops, and on the seventeenth her queen. Annette had not even castled yet. She reached out and laid her king on its side when Beth took her queen. “That was quick,” she said. She sounded relieved to have lost. Beth looked at the clock faces. Annette had used thirty minutes, and Beth seven. Waiting for Annette to move had been the only problem. The next round would not be until eleven. Beth had recorded the game with Annette on her score sheet, circled her own name at the top as winner; she went now to the front desk and put the sheet into the basket with the sign reading WINNERS. It was the first one there. A young man who looked like a college student came up as she was walking away and put his sheet in. Beth had already noticed that most of the people here weren’t good- looking. A lot of them had greasy hair and bad complexion; some were fat and nervous-looking. But this one was tall and angular and relaxed, and his face was open and handsome. He nodded amiably at Beth, acknowledging her as another fast player, and she nodded back.

She began walking around the room, quietly, looking at some of the games being played. Another couple finished theirs, and the winner went up front to turn in the record. She did not see any positions that looked interesting. On Board Number Seven, near the front of the room, Black had a chance to win a rook by a two-move combination, and she waited for him to move the necessary bishop. But when the time came he simply exchanged pawns in the center. He had not seen the combination. The tables began with Board Number Three rather than One. She looked around the room, at the rows of heads bowed over the boards, at the Beginners Section far across the gym. Players were getting up from their chairs as games ended. At the far side of the room was a doorway she hadn’t noticed before. Above it was a cardboard sign saying “Top Boards.” Beth walked over. It was a smaller room, not much bigger than Mrs. Wheatley’s living room. There were two separate tables and a game was going on at each. The tables sat in the center of the floor and a black velvet rope on wooden staunchions kept the watchers from getting too close to the players. There were four or five people silently watching the games, most of them clustered around Board Number One, on her left. The tall, good-looking player was one of them. At Board One two men were sitting in what seemed to be utter concentration. The clock between them was different from the others Beth had seen; it was bigger and sturdier. One man was fat and balding with a darkness to his features like the Russians in the pictures, and he wore a dark suit like the Russians’. The other was much younger and wore a gray sweater over a white shirt. He unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and pulled up the sleeves to his elbows, one arm at a time, not taking his eyes from the board. Something in Beth’s stomach thrilled. This was the real thing. She held her breath and studied the position on the board. It took a few moments to penetrate it; it was balanced and difficult, like some of the championship games in Chess Review. She knew it was Black’s move because the indicator on his clock was moving, and just as she saw that knight to bishop five was what was called for, the older man reached out and moved his knight to bishop five. The good-looking man was leaning against the wall now. Beth went over to him and whispered, “Who are they?”

“Beltik and Cullen. Beltik’s the State Champion.” “Which is which?” Beth said. The tall man held a finger to his lips. Then he said softly, “Beltik’s the young one.” That was a surprise. The Kentucky State Champion looked to be about the age of Fergussen. “Is he a grandmaster?” “He’s working on it. He’s been a master for years.” “Oh,” Beth said. “It takes time. You have to play grandmasters.” “How much time?” Beth said. A man in front of them by the velvet ropes turned and stared at her angrily. The tall man shook his head, pursing his lips for silence. Beth turned back to the ropes and watched the game. Other people came in and the room began to fill up. Beth held her place at the front. There was a great deal of tension in the middle of the board. Beth studied it for several minutes trying to decide what she would do if it were her move; but she wasn’t certain. It was Cullen’s move. She waited for what seemed an awfully long time. He sat there with his forehead supported by clenched fists, knees together under the table, motionless. Beltik leaned back in his chair and yawned, looking amusedly at Cullen’s bald head in front of him. Beth could see that his teeth were bad, with dark stains and several empty spaces, and that his neck wasn’t properly shaved. Finally Cullen moved. He traded knights in the center. There were several fast moves and the tension lessened, with each player relinquishing a knight and a bishop in trades. When his move came again he looked up at Beltik and said, “Draw?” “Hell, no.” Beltik said. He studied the board impatiently, screwed up his face in a way that looked funny, smacked a fist into a palm, and moved his rook down to the seventh rank. Beth liked the move, and she liked the way Beltik picked up his pieces firmly and set them down with a tiny graceful flourish. In five more moves Cullen resigned. He was down by two pawns, his remaining bishop was locked into the back rank, and the time on his clock was almost up. He toppled his king with a kind of elegant disdain, reached over and gave a hasty handshake to Beltik, stood up and stepped over the rope, brushing past Beth, and left the room. Beltik stood and stretched. Beth

looked at him standing over the board with the toppled king, and something in her swelled with excitement. She felt goose bumps on her arms and legs. Beth’s next game was with a small and bristly man named Cooke; his rating was 1520. She printed it in at the top of the score sheet by Board Thirteen: “Harmon—Unr: Cooke–1520.” It was her turn to play white. She moved pawn to queen four and pressed Cooke’s clock, and he moved instantly with pawn to queen four. He seemed wound up very tight and his eyes kept glancing around the room. He couldn’t sit still in his chair. Beth played fast too, picking up some of his impatience. In five minutes they had both developed their pieces, and Cooke started an attack on her queenside. She decided to ignore it and advanced a knight. He hastily pushed a pawn up, and she saw with surprise that she could not take the pawn without risking a nasty double attack. She hesitated. Cooke was pretty good. The 1500 rating must mean something, after all. He was better than Mr. Shaibel or Mr. Ganz, and he looked a little scary with his impatience. She slid her rook to the bishop’s home square, putting it below the oncoming pawn. Cooke surprised her. He picked up his queen bishop and took one of the pawns next to her king with it, checking her and sacrificing the piece. She stared at the board, suddenly unsure for a moment. What was he up to? Then she saw it. If she took, he checked again with a knight and picked off a bishop. It would win him the pawn and bring her king out. Her stomach was tight for a moment; she did not like being surprised. It took her a minute to see what to do. She moved the king over but did not take the bishop. Cooke brought the knight down anyway. Beth traded the pawns over on the other side and opened the file for her rook. Cooke kept nagging her king with complications. She could see now that there was really no danger yet if she didn’t let it bluff her. She brought the rook out, and then doubled up with her queen. She liked that arrangement; it looked to her imagination like two cannons, lined up and ready to fire. In three moves she was able to fire them. Cooke seemed obsessed with the maneuvers he was setting up against her king and blind to what Beth was really doing. His moves were interesting, but she saw they had no solidity because he wasn’t taking in the whole board. If she had been playing only to avoid checkmate, he would have had her by the fourth move

after his first check with the bishop. But she nailed him on the third. She felt the blood rushing into her face as she saw the way to fire her rook. She took her queen and brought it all the way to the last rank, offering it to the black rook that sat back there, not yet moved. Cooke stopped his squirming for a moment and looked at her face. She looked back at him. Then he studied the position, and studied it. Finally he reached out and took her queen with his rook. Something in Beth wanted to jump and shout. But she held herself back, reached out, pushed her bishop over one square and quietly said, “Check.” Cooke started to move his king and stopped. Suddenly he saw what was going to happen: he was going to lose his queen and that rook he had just captured with, too. He looked at her. She sat there impassively. Cooke turned his attention to the board and studied it for several minutes, squirming in his seat and scowling. Then he looked back to Beth and said, “Draw?” Beth shook her head. Cooke scowled again. “You got me. I resign.” He stood up and held out his hand. “I didn’t see that coming at all.” His smile was surprisingly warm. “Thanks,” Beth said, shaking his hand. They broke for lunch and Beth got a sandwich and milk at a drugstore down the block from the high school; she ate it alone at the counter and left. Her third game was with an older man in a sleeveless sweater. His name was Kaplan and his rating was 1694. She played Black, used the Nimzo- Indian defense, and beat him in thirty-four moves. She might have done it quicker, but he was skillful at defending—even though with White a player should be on the attack. By the time he resigned she had his king exposed and a bishop about to be captured, and she had two passed pawns. He looked dazed. Some other players had gathered around to watch. It was three-thirty when they finished. Kaplan had played with maddening slowness, and Beth had gotten up from the table for several moves, to walk off her energy. By the time she brought the score sheet to the desk with her name circled on it, most of the other games were over and the tournament was breaking up for supper. There would be a round at eight o’clock that evening, then three more on Saturday. The final round would be on Sunday morning at eleven.

Beth went to the girls’ room and washed her face and hands; it was surprising how grubby her skin felt after three games of chess. She looked at herself in the mirror, under the harsh lights, and saw what she had always seen: the round uninteresting face and the colorless hair. But there was something different. The cheeks were flushed with color now, and her eyes looked more alive than she had ever seen them. For once in her life she liked what she saw in the mirror. Back outside by the front table the two young men who had registered her were putting up a notice on the bulletin board. Some players had gathered around it, the handsome one among them. She walked over. The lettering on top, done with a Magic Marker, read UNDEFEATED. There were four names on the list. At the bottom was HARMON: she held her breath for a moment when she saw it. And at the top of the list was the name BELTIK. “You’re Harmon, aren’t you?” It was the handsome one. “Yes.” “Keep it up, kid,” he said, smiling. Just then the young man who had tried to put her in the Beginners Section shouted from the table, “Harmon!” She turned. “Looks like you were right, Harmon,” he said. *** Mrs. Wheatley was eating a potroast TV dinner with whipped potatoes when Beth came in. Bat Masterson was on, very loudly. “Yours is in the oven,” Mrs. Wheatley said. She was in the chintz chair with the aluminum plate on a tray in her lap. Her stockings were rolled down to the tops of her black pumps. During the commercial, while Beth was eating the carrots from her TV dinner, Mrs. Wheatley asked, “How did you do, honey?” and Beth said, “I won three games.” “That’s nice,” Mrs. Wheatley said, not taking her eyes from the elderly gentleman who was telling about the relief he had gotten from Haley’s M.O. ***

That evening Beth was on Board Six opposite a homely young man named Klein. His rating was 1794. Some of the games printed in Chess Review were from players with lower ratings than that. Beth was White, and she played pawn to king four, hoping for the Sicilian. She knew the Sicilian better than anything else. But Klein played pawn to king four and then fianchettoed his king’s bishop, setting it over in the corner above his castled king. She wasn’t quite sure but thought this was the kind of opening called “Irregular.” In the middle game, things got complex. Beth was unsure what to do and decided to retreat a bishop. She set her index finger on the piece and immediately saw she had better move pawn to queen four. She reached over to the queen pawn. “Sorry,” Klein said. “Touch move.” She looked at him. “You have to move the bishop,” he said. She could see in his face he was glad to say it. He had probably seen what she could do if she moved the pawn. She shrugged and tried to act unconcerned, but inside she was feeling something she hadn’t felt before in a chess game. She was frightened. She moved the bishop to bishop four, sat back and folded her hands in her lap. Her stomach was in a knot. She should have moved the pawn. She looked at Klein’s face as he studied the board. After a moment she saw a little malicious grin. He pushed his queen’s pawn to the fifth square, punched his clock smartly and folded his arms across his chest. He was going to get one of her bishops. And abruptly her fear was replaced by anger. She leaned over the board and placed her cheeks against her palms, studying intently. It took her almost ten minutes, but she found it. She moved and sat back. Klein hardly seemed to notice. He took the bishop as she hoped he would. Beth advanced her queen rook pawn, way over on the other side of the board, and Klein grunted slightly but moved quickly, pushing the queen pawn forward again. Beth brought her knight over, covering the pawn’s next step, and more important, attacking Klein’s rook. He moved the rook. Inside Beth’s stomach something was beginning to uncoil. Her vision seemed extremely sharp, as though she could read the finest print from across the room. She moved the knight, attacking the rook again.

Klein looked at her, annoyed. He studied the board and moved the rook, to the very square Beth had known, two moves ago, that he would move to. She brought her queen out to bishop five, right above Klein’s castled king. Still looking annoyed and sure of himself, Klein brought a knight over to defend. Beth picked up her queen, her face flushing, and took the pawn in front of the king, sacrificing her queen. He stared and took the queen. There was nothing else he could do to get out of check. Beth brought her bishop out for another check. Klein interposed the pawn, as she knew he would. “That’s mate in two,” Beth said quietly. Klein stared at her, his face furious. “What do you mean?” he said. Beth’s voice was still quiet. “The rook comes over for the next check and then the knight mates.” He scowled. “My queen—” “Your queen’ll be pinned,” she said, “after the king moves.” He looked back to the board and stared at the position. Then he said, “Shit!” He did not turn over his king or offer to shake Beth’s hand. He got up from the table and walked away, jamming his hands into his pockets. Beth took her pencil and circled HARMON on her score sheet. When she left at ten o’clock there were three names on the UNDEFEATED list. HARMON was still at the bottom. BELTIK was still at the top. In her room that night she could not get to sleep because of the way the games kept playing themselves over and over in her head long after she had stopped enjoying them. After several hours of this she got out of bed and in her blue pajamas walked over to the dormer windows. She raised a shade and looked out at the newly bare trees by the light of the street lamp, and at the dark houses beyond the trees. The street was silent and empty. There was a sliver of a moon, partly obscured by clouds. The air was chilly. Beth had learned not to believe in God during her time in Methuen’s chapel, and she never prayed. But now she said, under her breath, Please God let me play Beltik and checkmate him. In her desk drawer, in the toothbrush holder, were seventeen green pills, and there were more in a little box on her closet shelf. She had thought

earlier about taking two of them to help her doze off. But she did not. She went back to bed, exhausted now and her mind blank, and slept soundly. *** On Saturday morning she had hoped to be playing someone with a rating over 1800. The man at registration had said there were three who were that high. But on the pairings she was shown playing Black against someone named Townes with a rating of 1724. That was lower than her last game, the evening before. She went to the desk and asked about it. “That’s the breaks, Harmon,” the man in the white shirt said. “Consider yourself lucky.” “I want to play the best,” Beth said. “You have to get a rating before that happens,” the young man said. “How do I get a rating?” “You play thirty games in USCF tournaments and then wait four months. That’s how you get a rating.” “That’s too long.” The man leaned toward her. “How old are you, Harmon?” “Thirteen.” “You’re the youngest person in the room. You can wait for a rating.” Beth was furious. “I want to play Beltik.” The other man at the table spoke up. “If you win your next three games, honey. And if Beltik does the same.” “I’ll win them,” Beth said. “No, you won’t, Harmon,” the first young man said. “You’ll have to play Sizemore and Goldmann first, and you can’t beat both of them.” “Sizemore and Goldmann shit,” the other man said. “The guy you’re playing now is underrated. He plays first board for the university team and last month he came in fifth in Las Vegas. Don’t let the rating fool you.” “What’s in Las Vegas?” Beth asked. “The U.S. Open.” ***

Beth went to Board Four. The man seated behind the white pieces was smiling as she came up. It was the tall, handsome one. Beth felt a bit rattled to see him. He looked like some kind of movie star. “Hi, Harmon,” he said, holding out his hand. “It looks like we’ve been stalking each other.” She shook his big hand awkwardly and seated herself. There was a pause for a long minute before he said, “Do you want to start my clock?” “Sorry,” she said. She reached out to start it, almost knocked it over but caught it in time. “Sorry,” she said again, almost inaudibly. She pressed the button and his clock started ticking. She looked down at the board, her cheeks burning. He played pawn to king four, and she replied with the Sicilian. He continued with book moves and she followed with the Dragon variation. They traded pawns in the center. Gradually she got her composure back, playing these mechanical moves, and she looked across the board at him. He was attentive to the pieces, scowling. But even with a scowl on his face and his hair slightly mussed he was handsome. Something in Beth’s stomach felt strange as she looked at him, with his broad shoulders and clear complexion and his brow wrinkled in concentration. He surprised her by bringing his queen out. It was a bold move, and she studied it for a while and saw that there wasn’t any weakness to it. She brought out her own queen. He moved a knight to the fifth rank, and Beth moved a knight to the fifth rank. He checked with a bishop, and she defended with a pawn. He retreated the bishop. She was feeling light now, and her fingers with the pieces were nimble. Both players began moving fast but easily. She gave a non-threatening check to his king, and he pulled away delicately and began advancing pawns. She stopped that handily with a pin and then feinted on the queenside with a rook. He was undeceived by the feint and, smiling, removed her pin, and on his next move continued the pawn advances. She retreated, hiding her king in a queenside castle. She felt somehow spacious and amused, yet her face remained serious. They continued their dance. It made her sad in a way when she eventually saw how to beat him. It was after the nineteenth move, and she felt herself resisting it as it opened up in her mind, hating to let go of the pleasant ballet they had danced

together. But there it was: four moves and he would have to lose a rook or worse. She hesitated and made the first move of the sequence. He didn’t see what was happening until two moves later, when he frowned suddenly and said, “Jesus Christ, Harmon, I’m going to drop a rook!” She loved his voice; she loved the way he said it. He shook his head in mock bafflement; she loved that. Some players who had finished their game early had gathered around the board, and a couple were whispering about the maneuver Beth had brought off. Townes went on playing for five more moves, and Beth felt genuinely sorry for him when he resigned, tipping his king over and saying “Damn!” But he stood up, stretched and smiled down at her. “You’re one hell of a chess player, Harmon,” he said. “How old are you?” “Thirteen.” He whistled. “Where do you go to school?” “Fairfield Junior.” “Yeah,” he said. “I know where that is.” He was even better-looking than a movie star. An hour later she drew Goldmann and Board Three. She walked into the tournament room at exactly eleven, and the people standing stopped talking when she came in. Everyone looked at her. She heard someone whisper, “Thirteen fucking years old,” and immediately the thought came into her mind, along with the exultant feeling the whispered voice had given her: I could have done this at eight. Goldmann was tough and silent and slow. He was a short, heavy man, and he played the black pieces like a gruff general trained in defense. For the first hour everything that Beth tried he got out of. Every piece he had was protected; it seemed as though there were double the usual complement of pawns to protect them. Beth got fidgety during the long waits for him to move; once after she had advanced a bishop she got up, and went to the bathroom. Something was hurting in her abdomen, and she felt a bit faint. She washed her face with cold water and dried it on a paper towel. As she was leaving, the girl she’d played her first game with came in. Packer. Packer looked glad to see her. “You’re moving right on up, aren’t you?” she said. “So far,” Beth said, feeling another twinge in her belly.

“I heard you’re playing Goldmann.” “Yes,” Beth said. “I have to get back.” “Sure,” Packer said, “sure. Beat his ass, will you? Just beat his ass.” Suddenly Beth grinned. “Okay,” she said. When she got back she saw that Goldmann had moved, and her clock was ticking. He sat there in his dark suit looking bored. She felt refreshed and ready. She seated herself and put everything out of her mind except the sixty-four squares in front of her. After a minute she saw that if she attacked on both flanks simultaneously, as Morphy did sometimes, Goldmann would have difficulty playing it safe. She played pawn to queen rook four. It worked. After five moves she had opened his king up a little, and after three more she was at his throat. She paid no attention to Goldmann himself or to the crowd or to the feeling in her lower abdomen or the sweat that had broken out on her brow. She played against the board only, with lines of force etched for her into its surface: the small stubborn fields for the pawns, the enormous one for the queen, the gradations in between. Just before his clock was about to run out she checkmated him. When she circled her name on the score sheet she looked again at the number of Goldmann’s rating. It was 1997. People were applauding. She went directly to the girls’ room and discovered that she had begun to menstruate. For a moment she felt, looking at the redness in the water below her, as though something catastrophic had happened. Had she bled on the chair at Board Three? Were the people there staring at the stains of her blood? But she saw with relief that her cotton panties were barely spotted. She thought abruptly of Jolene. If it hadn’t been for Jolene, she would have had no idea what was happening. No one else had said a word about this— certainly not Mrs. Wheatley. She felt a sudden warmth for Jolene, remembering that Jolene had also told her what to do “in an emergency.” Beth began pulling a long sheet from the roll of toilet paper and folding it into a tightly packed rectangle. The pain in her abdomen had eased. She was menstruating, and she had just beaten Goldmann: 1997. She put the folded paper into her panties, pulled them up tight, straightened her skirt and walked confidently back into the playing area. ***

Beth had seen Sizemore before; he was a small, ugly, thin-faced man who smoked cigarettes continuously. Someone had told her he was State Champion before Beltik. Beth would play him on Board Two in the room with the sign reading “Top Boards.” Sizemore wasn’t there yet, but next to her, at Board One, Beltik was facing in her direction. Beth looked at him and then looked away. It was a few minutes before three. The lights in this smaller room—bare bulbs under a metal protection basket—seemed brighter than those in the big room, brighter than they had been in the morning, and for a moment the shine on the varnished floor with its painted red lines was blinding. Sizemore came in, combing his hair in a nervous, quick way. A cigarette hung from his thin lips. As he pulled his chair back, Beth felt herself becoming very tight. “Ready?” Sizemore asked gruffly, slipping the comb into his shirt pocket. “Yes,” she said and punched his clock. He played pawn to king four and then pulled out his comb and started biting on it the way a person bites on the eraser end of a pencil. Beth played pawn to queen bishop four. By the middle game Sizemore had begun combing his hair after each move. He hardly ever looked at Beth but concentrated on the board, wriggling in his seat sometimes as he combed and parted and reparted his hair. The game was even, and there were no weaknesses on either side. There was nothing to do but find the best squares for her knights and bishops and wait. She would move, write the move down on her score sheet and sit back in her chair. After a while a crowd began to gather at the ropes. She glanced at them from time to time. There were more people watching her play than watching Beltik. She kept looking at the board, waiting for something to open up. Once when she looked up she saw Annette Packer standing at the back. Packer smiled and Beth nodded to her. Back at the board, Sizemore brought a knight to queen five, posting it in the best place for a knight. Beth frowned; she couldn’t dislodge it. The pieces were thick in the middle of the board and for a moment she lost the sense of them. There were occasional twinges in her abdomen. She could feel the thick batch of paper between her thighs. She adjusted herself in her chair and squinted at the board. This wasn’t good. Sizemore was creeping up on her. She looked at his face. He had put away his comb and was

looking at the pieces in front of him with satisfaction. Beth leaned over the table, digging her fists into her cheeks, and tried to penetrate the position. Some people in the crowd were whispering. With an effort she drove distractions from her mind. It was time to fight back. If she moved the knight on the left… No. If she opened the long diagonal for her white bishop… That was it. She pushed the pawn up, and the bishop’s power was tripled. The picture started to become clearer. She leaned back in her seat and took a deep breath. During the next five moves Sizemore kept bringing pieces up, but Beth, seeing the limits to what he could do to her, kept her attention focused on the far left-hand corner of the board, on Sizemore’s queenside; when the time came she brought her bishop down in the middle of his clustered pieces there, setting it on his knight two square. From where it sat now, two of his pieces could capture it, but if either did, he would be in trouble. She looked at him. He had taken out his comb again and was running it through his hair. His clock was ticking. It took him fifteen minutes to make the move, and when he did it was a shock. He took the bishop with his rook. Didn’t he know he was a fool to move the rook off the back rank? Couldn’t he see that? She looked back at the board, double-checked the position and brought out her queen. He didn’t see it until the move after next, and his game fell apart. He still had his comb in his hand six moves later when she got her queen’s pawn, passed, to the sixth rank. He brought his rook under the pawn. She attacked it with her bishop. Sizemore stood up, put his comb in his pocket, reached down to the board and set his king on its side. “You win,” he said grimly. The applause was thunderous. After she had turned in the score sheet she waited while the young man checked it, made a mark on a list in front of him, stood up and walked to the bulletin board. He took the pushpins from the card saying SIZEMORE and threw the card into a green metal wastebasket. Then he pulled the pins out of the bottom card and raised it to where Sizemore’s had been. The UNDEFEATED list now read: BELTIK, HARMON. When she was walking toward the girls’ room Beltik came out of “Top Boards” striding fast and looking very pleased with himself. He was

carrying the little score sheet, on his way to the winners’ basket. He didn’t seem to see Beth. She went over to the doorway of the “Top Boards” room, and Townes was standing there. There were lines of fatigue in his face; he looked like Rock Hudson, except for the weariness. “Good work, Harmon,” he said. “I’m sorry you lost,” she said. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s back to the drawing board.” And then, nodding to where Beltik was standing at the front table with a small crowd gathered near him, he said, “He’s a killer, Harmon. A genuine killer.” She looked at his face. “You need a rest.” He smiled down at her. “What I need, Harmon, is some of your talent.” As she passed the front table, Beltik took a step toward her and said, “Tomorrow.” *** When Beth came into the living room just before supper, Mrs. Wheatley looked pale and strange. She was sitting in the chintz armchair and her face was puffy. She was holding a brightly colored postcard in her lap. “I’ve started menstruating,” Beth said. Mrs. Wheatley blinked. “That’s nice,” she said, as though from a great distance. “I’ll need some pads or something,” Beth said. Mrs. Wheatley seemed nonplused for a moment. Then she brightened. “That’s certainly a milepost for you. Why don’t you just go up to my room and look in the top drawer of my chiffonier? Take all you require.” “Thank you,” Beth said, heading for the stairs. “And, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “bring down that little bottle of green pills by my bedside.” When Beth came back she gave the pills to Mrs. Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley had half a glass of beer sitting beside her; she took out two of the pills and swallowed them with the beer. “My tranquility needs to be refurbished,” she said. “Is something wrong?” Beth asked. “I’m not Aristotle,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “but it could be construed as wrong. I have received a message from Mr. Wheatley.”

“What did he say?” “Mr. Wheatley has been indefinitely detained in the Southwest. The American Southwest.” “Oh,” Beth said. “Between Denver and Butte.” Beth sat down on the sofa. “Aristotle was a moral philosopher,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “while I am a housewife. Or was a housewife.” “Can’t they send me back if you don’t have a husband?” “You put it concretely.” Mrs. Wheatley sipped her beer. “They won’t if we lie about it.” “That’s easy enough,” Beth said. “You’re a good soul, Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley said, finishing her beer. “Why don’t you heat the two chicken dinners in the freezer? Set the oven at four hundred.” Beth had been holding two sanitary napkins in her right hand. “I don’t know how to put these on.” Mrs. Wheatley straightened herself up from her slumped position in the chair. “I am no longer a wife,” she said, “except by legal fiction. I believe I can learn to be a mother. I’ll show you how if you promise me never to go near Denver.” *** During the night Beth woke to hear rain on the roof over her head and intermittent rattling against the panes of her dormer windows. She had been dreaming of water, of herself swimming easily in a quiet ocean of still water. She put a pillow over her head and curled up on her side, trying to get back to sleep. But she could not. The rain was loud, and as it continued to fall, the sad languor of her dream was replaced by the image of a chessboard filled with pieces demanding her attention, demanding the clarity of her intelligence. It was two in the morning and she did not get back to sleep for the rest of the night. It was still raining when she went downstairs at seven; the backyard outside the kitchen window looked like a swamp with hillocks of near-dead grass sticking up like islands. She was not certain how to fry eggs

but decided she could boil some. She got two from the refrigerator, filled a pan with water and put it on the burner. She would play pawn to king four against him, and hope for the Sicilian. She boiled the eggs five minutes and put them in cold water. She could see Beltik’s face, youthful, arrogant and smart. His eyes were small and black. When he stepped toward her yesterday as she was leaving, some part of her had thought he would hit her. The eggs were perfect; she opened them with a knife, put them in a cup and ate them with salt and butter. Her eyes were grainy under the lids. The final game would begin at eleven; it was seven-twenty now. She wished she had a copy of Modern Chess Openings, to look over variations on the Sicilian. Some of the other players at the tournament had carried battered copies of the book under their arms. It was only drizzling when she left the house at ten, and Mrs. Wheatley was still upstairs asleep. Before she left, Beth went into the bathroom and checked the sanitary belt Mrs. Wheatley had given her to wear, and the thick white pad. It was all right. She put on her galoshes and her blue coat, got Mrs. Wheatley’s umbrella from the closet and left. *** She had noticed before that the pieces at Board One were different. They were solid wooden ones like Mr. Ganz’s and not the hollow plastic pieces that sat on the other boards at the tournament. When she walked by the table in the empty room at ten-thirty she reached out and picked up the white king. It was satisfyingly heavy, with a solid lead weight and green felt on the bottom. She placed the piece on its home square, stepped back over the velvet rope and walked to the girls’ room. She washed her face for the third time that day, tightened her sanitary belt, combed her bangs and went back to the gymnasium. More players had come in. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her skirt so that no one could see they were trembling. When eleven o’clock came she was ready behind the white pieces at Board One. Boards Two and Three had already started their games. Sizemore was at Board Two. She didn’t recognize the others. Ten minutes passed, and Beltik did not appear. The tournament director in the white shirt climbed over and stood near Beth for a minute. “Hasn’t shown yet?” he said softly.

Beth shook her head. “Make your move and punch the clock” the director whispered. “You should have done it at eleven.” That annoyed her. No one had told her about that. She moved pawn to king four and started Beltik’s clock. It was ten more minutes before Beltik came in. Beth’s stomach hurt and her eyes smarted. Beltik looked casual and relaxed, wearing a bright-red shirt and tan corduroy pants. “Sorry,” he said in a normal voice. “Extra cup of coffee.” The other players looked over at him with irritation. Beth said nothing. Beltik, still standing, loosened an extra button on his shirt front and held out his hand. “Harry Beltik,” he said. “What’s your name?” He must know what her name was. “I’m Beth Harmon,” she said, taking his hand but avoiding his eyes. He seated himself behind the black pieces, rubbed his hands together briskly and moved his king pawn to the third square. He punched Beth’s clock smartly. The French Defense. She had never played it. She didn’t like the look of it. The thing to do was play pawn to queen four. But what happened if he played the same? Did she trade pawns or push one of them forward, or bring out her knight? She squinted and shook her head; it was difficult to picture what the board would look like after the moves. She looked again, rubbed her eyes, and played pawn to queen four. When she reached out to punch the clock she hesitated. Had she made a mistake? But it was too late now. She pressed the button hastily and as it clicked down Beltik immediately picked up his queen pawn, put it on queen four and slapped down the button on his clock. Although it was difficult to see with her usual clarity, she had not lost her sense of the requirements of an opening. She brought out her knights and involved herself for a while in a struggle for the center squares. But Beltik, moving fast, nipped off one of her pawns and she saw that she couldn’t capture the pawn he did it with. She tried to shrug off the advantage she’d allowed and went on playing. She got her pieces off the back rank, and castled. She looked over the board at Beltik. He seemed completely at ease; he was looking at the game going on next to them. Beth felt a knot in her stomach; she could not get comfortable in her seat. The heavy cluster of

pieces and pawns in the center of the board seemed for a while to have no pattern, to make no sense. Her clock was ticking. She inclined her head to look at its face; twenty- five minutes were gone, and she was still down by a pawn. And Beltik had used only twenty-two minutes altogether, even including the time he’d wasted by being late. There was a ringing in her ears, and the bright light in the room hurt her eyes. Beltik was leaning back with his arms outstretched, yawning, showing the black places on the undersides of his teeth. She found what looked like a good square for her knight, reached out her hand and then stopped. The move would be terrible; something had to be done about his queen before he had it on the rook file and was ready to threaten. She had to protect and attack at the same time, and she couldn’t see how. The pieces in front of her just sat there. She should have taken a green pill last night, to make her sleep. Then she saw a move that looked sensible and quickly made it. She brought a knight back near the king, protecting herself against Beltik’s queen. He raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly and immediately took a pawn on the other side of the board. There was suddenly a diagonal open for his bishop. The bishop was aimed at the knight she’d wasted time bringing back, and she was down by another pawn. At the corner of Beltik’s mouth was a sly little smile. She quickly looked away from his face, frightened. She had to do something. He would be all over her king in four or five moves. She need to concentrate, to see it clearly. But when she looked at the board, everything was dense, interlocked, complicated, dangerous. Then she thought of something to do. With her clock still running she stood up, stepped over the rope and walked through the small crowd of silent spectators to the main gym floor and across it to the girls’ room. There was no one there. She went to a sink, washed her face with cold water, wet a handful of paper towels and held them for a minute to the back of her neck. After she threw them away she went into one of the little stalls and, sitting, checked her sanitary napkin. It was okay. She sat there relaxing, letting her mind go blank. Her elbows were on her knees, her head was bent down. With an effort of will she made the chessboard with the game on Board One on it appear in front of her. There it was. She could see immediately

that it was difficult, but not as difficult as some of the games she’d memorized from the book at Morris’s Book Store. The pieces before her, in her imagination, were crisp and sharply focused. She stayed where she was, not worrying about time, until she had it penetrated and understood. Then she got up, washed her face again and walked back into the gym. She had found her move. There were more people gathered in “Top Boards” than before; as games ended they came in to watch the finals. She pushed by them, stepped over the rope and sat down. Her hands were perfectly steady, and her stomach and eyes felt fine. She reached out and moved; she punched the clock firmly. Beltik studied the move for a few minutes and took her knight with his bishop, as she knew he would. She did not retake; she brought a bishop over to attack one of his rooks. He moved the rook the button down on his clock, leaned back in his chair and drew a deep breath. “It doesn’t work,” Beth said. “I don’t have to take the queen.” “Move,” Beltik said. “I’ll check you first with the bishop—” “Move!” She nodded and checked with the bishop. Beltik, with his clock ticking, quickly moved his king away and pressed the button. Then Beth did what she had planned all along. She brought her queen crashing down next to the king, sacrificing it. Beltik looked at her, stunned. She stared back at him. He shrugged, snatched up the queen and stopped his clock by hitting it with the base of the captured piece. Beth pushed her other bishop from the back rank out to the middle of the board and said, “Check. Mate next move.” Beltik stared at it for a moment, said, “Son of a bitch!” and stood up. “The rook mates,” Beth said. “Son of a bitch,” Beltik said. The crowd that had now filled the room began applauding. Beltik, still scowling, held out his hand, and Beth shook it.

FIVE They were ready to close by the time she got to the teller. She’d had to wait for the bus after school and wait again transferring down Main. And this was the second bank. She’d carried the folded check in her blouse pocket all day, under the sweater. It was in her hand when the man in front of her picked up his rolls of nickels and stuffed them in the pocket of his overcoat and left the space at the window for her. She set her hand on the cold marble, holding the check out and standing on tiptoe, to be able to see the face of the teller. “I’d like to open an account,” Beth said. The man glanced at the check. “How old are you, miss?” “Thirteen.” “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ll need a parent or guardian with you.” Beth put the check back in her blouse pocket and left. At the house, Mrs. Wheatley had four empty Pabst Blue Ribbon beer bottles sitting on the little table by her chair. The TV was off. Beth had picked up the afternoon paper from the front porch; she unfolded it as she came into the living room. “How was school, dear?” Mrs. Wheatley’s voice was dim and far away. “It was okay.” As Beth set the newspaper on the green plastic hassock by the sofa she saw with quiet astonishment that her own picture was printed on the front page, at the bottom. Near the top was the face of Nikita Khrushchev and at the bottom, one column wide, was her face, scowling beneath a headline: LOCAL PRODIGY TAKES CHESS TOURNEY. Under this, in smaller letters, boldface: TWELVE-YEAR-OLD ASTONISHES EXPERTS. She remembered the man taking her picture before they gave her the trophy and the check. She had told him she was thirteen. Beth bent over, reading the paper:

The world of Kentucky Chess was astonished this weekend by the playing of a local girl, who triumphed over hardened players to win the Kentucky State Championship. Elizabeth Harmon, a seventh-grade student at Fairfield Junior, showed “a mastery of the game unequaled by any female” according to Harry Beltik, whom Miss Harmon defeated for the state crown. Beth grimaced; she hated the picture of herself. It showed her freckles and her small nose all too clearly. “I want to open a bank account,” she said. “A bank account?” “You’ll have to go with me.” “But, my dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “what would you open a bank account with?” Beth reached into her blouse pocket, took out the check and handed it to her. Mrs. Wheatley sat up in her chair and held the check in her hand as though it were a Dead Sea Scroll. She was silent for a moment, reading it. Then she said softly, “One hundred dollars.” “I need a parent or guardian. At the bank.” “One hundred dollars.” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Then you won it?” “Yes. It says ‘First Place’ on the check.” “I see,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I hadn’t the foggiest idea people made money playing chess.” “Some tournaments have bigger prizes than that.” “Goodness!” Mrs. Wheatley was still staring at the check. “We can go to the bank after school tomorrow.” “Certainly,” Mrs. Wheatley said. The next day, when they came into the living room after the bank, there was a copy of Chess Review on the cobbler’s bench in front of the sofa. Mrs. Wheatley hung her coat in the hall closet and picked up the magazine. “While you were at school,” she said, “I was leafing through this. I see there’s a major tournament in Cincinnati the second week in December. First prize is five hundred dollars.” Beth studied her for a long moment. “I have to be in school then,” she said. “And Cincinnati’s pretty far from here.” “The Greyhound bus requires only two hours for the trip,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I took the liberty of calling.”

“What about school?” Beth said. “I can write a medical excuse, claiming mono.” “Mono?” “Mononucleosis. It’s quite the thing in your age group, according to the Ladies’ Home Journal.” Beth kept looking at her, trying not to let the astonishment show in her face. Mrs. Wheatley’s dishonesty seemed in every way to match her own. Then she said, “Where would we stay?” “At the Gibson Hotel, in a double room at twenty-two dollars a night. The Greyhound tickets will be eleven-eighty apiece, and there will, of course, be the cost of food. I have calculated all of it. Even if you win second or third prize, there will be a profit.” Beth had twenty dollars in cash and a packet of ten checks in her plastic purse. “I need to buy some chess books,” she said. “By all means,” Mrs. Wheatley said, smiling. “And if you’ll make out a check for twenty-three dollars and sixty cents, I’ll get the bus tickets tomorrow.” *** After buying Modem Chess Openings and a book on the endgame at Morris’s, Beth walked across the street to Purcell’s Department Store. She knew from the way girls talked at school that Purcell’s was better than Ben Snyder’s. She found what she wanted on the fourth floor: a wooden set almost identical to the one Mr. Ganz owned, with hand-carved knights and big, substantial pawns, and rooks that were fat and solid. She was undecided for a while over the board and almost bought a wooden one before settling on a folding linen board with green and beige squares. It would be more portable than the other. Back home she cleared off her desk, put the board on it and set up the pieces. She piled her new chessbooks on one side and placed the tall silver trophy in the shape of a chess king on the other. She turned on her student lamp and sat at the desk, just looking at the pieces, at the way their curves picked up the light. She sat for what seemed like a long time, her mind quiet. Then she picked up Modern Chess Openings. This time she began at the beginning.

*** She had never seen anything like the Gibson Hotel before. Its size and bustle, the bright chandeliers in its lobby, the heavy red carpeting, the flowers, even the three revolving doors and the uniformed doorman who stood beside them were overwhelming. She and Mrs. Wheatley walked up to the front of the hotel from the bus station, carrying their new luggage. Mrs. Wheatley refused to hand it over to the doorman. She lugged her suitcase up to the front desk and registered for them both, unperturbed by the look the room clerk gave them. In the room afterward, Beth began to relax. There were two big windows overlooking Fourth Street with its rush hour traffic. It was a crisp, cold day outside. Inside they had this thick-carpeted room with the big white bathroom and fluffy red towels and a huge plate-glass mirror covering one wall. There was a color TV on the dresser and a bright-red bedspread on each of the beds. Mrs. Wheatley was inspecting the room, checking the dresser drawers, clicking the TV on and off, patting away a wrinkle on the bedspread. “Well,” she said, “I asked them for a pleasant room, and I believe they gave it to me.” She seated herself in the high-backed Victorian chair by her bed as though she had lived in the Gibson Hotel all her life. The tournament was on the mezzanine in the Taft Room; all Beth had to do was take the elevator. Mrs. Wheatley found them a diner down the street where they had bacon and eggs for breakfast, then she went back to bed with a copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer and a pack of Chesterfields while Beth went down to the tournament and registered. She still did not have a rating, but this time one of the men at the desk knew who she was; they didn’t try to put her in the Beginners Section. There would be two games a day, and the time control would be 120/40, which meant you had two hours to make forty moves. While she was signing in, she could hear a deep voice coming through one of the double doors that stood open to the Taft Room, where the games would be. She looked that way and saw part of the big ballroom, with a long row of empty tables and a few men walking around. When she walked in, she saw a strange man slouched on a sofa with black-booted feet resting on a coffee table. “…and the rook comes to the

seventh rank,” he was saying. “Bone in the throat, man, that rook there. He took one look at it and paid up.” He leaned his head against the back of the sofa and laughed loudly in a deep baritone. “Twenty bucks.” Since it was early, there were only half a dozen people in the room, and no one was at the long rows of tables with paper chessboards on them. Everyone was listening to the man talking. He was about twenty-five and looked like a pirate. He wore dirty jeans, a black turtleneck and a black wool cap pulled down to his heavy eyebrows. He had a thick black mustache and clearly needed a shave; the backs of his hands were tanned and scraped-looking. “The Caro-Kann Defense,” he said, laughing. “A genuine bummer.” “What’s wrong with the Caro-Kann?” someone asked. A neat young man in a camel’s hair sweater. “All pawns and no hope.” He lowered his legs to the floor and sat up. On the table was a soiled old beige-and-green chessboard with battered wooden pieces on it. The head had fallen off the black king at some time or other; it was held on with a piece of gritty adhesive tape. “I’ll show you,” the man said, sliding the board over. Beth was now standing next to him. She was the only girl in the room. The man reached down to the board and with surprising delicacy picked up the white king pawn with his fingertips and dropped it lightly on king four. Then he picked up the black queen bishop pawn and dropped it on queen’s bishop three, put White’s queen pawn on the fourth rank and did the same with Black’s. He looked up at the people around him, who were by now all paying close attention. “The Caro-Kann. Right?” Beth was familiar with these moves, but she had never seen them played. She expected the man to move the white queen’s knight next, and he did. Then he had the black pawn capture the white, and took the capturing pawn with the white knight. He played Black’s king knight to bishop three and brought White’s other knight out. Beth remembered the move. Looking at it now, it seemed tame. She found herself speaking up. “I’d take the knight,” she said quietly. The man looked at her and raised his eyebrows. “Aren’t you that kid from Kentucky—the one who wiped out Harry Beltik?” “Yes,” Beth said. “If you take the knight, it doubles his pawns…”

“Big deal,” the man said. “All pawns and no hope. Here’s how to win with Black.” He left the knight in the center of the board and played Black’s pawn to king four. Then he continued laying out the moves of a game, shuffling the pieces around on the board with casual dexterity, occasionally pointing out a potential trap. The game built to a balanced fugue in the center. It was like time-lapse photography on TV where a pale-green stalk humps itself from dirt, heightens, swells and explodes into a peony or a rose. Some other people had come into the room and were watching. Beth was feeling a new kind of excitement with this display, with the knowingness, the clarity and nerve of the man in the black cap. He began trading pieces in the center, lifting the captured ones off the board with his fingertips as though they were dead flies, keeping up a soft-voiced patter that pointed out necessities and weaknesses, pitfalls and strengths. Once, when he had to reach across the board to the back rank and move a rook from its home square, she was astonished to see as he stretched his body that he was carrying a knife at his waist. The leather-and-metal handle protruded above his belt. He looked so much like someone out of Treasure Island that the knife did not seem at all out of place. Just then he paused in his moving and said, “Now watch this,” and brought the black rook up to its king five square, setting it down with a muted flourish. He folded his arms across his chest. “What does White do here?” he asked, looking around him. Beth considered the board. There were pitfalls all over for white. One of the men watching spoke up. “Queen takes pawn?” The man in the cap shook his head, smiling. “Rook to king eight check. And the queen falls.” Beth had seen that. It looked to be all over for the white pieces and she started to say so when another man spoke up. “That’s Mieses-Reshevsky. From the thirties.” The man looked up at him. “You’ve got it,” he said. “Margate. Nineteen thirty-five.” “White played rook to queen one,” the first man said. “Right,” said the other. “What else has he got?” He made the move and continued. It was clear now that White was losing. There were some fast trades and then an endgame that looked for a moment as though it might be slow, but Black made a striking sacrifice of a passed pawn and abruptly the